As another wild season of alternate-history interplanetary hijinks draws to a close, it's time to reflect on what we've seen and to look forward to next season. Season three has brought us even more of the big swings that "For All Mankind" specializes in, and although they don't all result in great storytelling, I always prefer a bold attempt that doesn't quite stick the landing to a safer, less interesting set of moves. We won't get into them all in-depth, but this season finale does a nice job of making some concluding remarks on show-favorite themes, including heroism, self-sacrifice, love, loyalty, teamwork, collaboration, individuality, and the drive for exploration that unites these precious (and in one case, quite literal) space babies.
Let's get some of the biggest questions out of the way right off the bat: Who gets killed off this time? "For All Mankind" revels in killing its own darlings, so I was convinced that we'd witness another death among the Mars crew, especially now that the three mission groups have merged so successfully. There were so many options! Ed might well crash Popeye; alternately, Ed might kill Danny after his self-serving confession about sabotaging the drill (sorry, but no jury would convict); Kelly and/or her baby might die due to childbirth complications; or the newly decorated Official American Hero Will Tyler might nobly sacrifice himself to save his best bud Rolan. Not that I wish any of them dead, but I do think it's time for the characters we met and have loved from the beginning to recede into the background. They deserve to enjoy a long and well-deserved retirement the way real people do! They can pop up once or twice each season to provide encouragement and sage wisdom, and let the next generation take center stage, already.
Killing off Karen and Molly both breaks my heart and makes narrative sense. After decades of being thought of as the (ex-)wife of legendary heroic space fellow Ed Baldwin, it's Karen who saves at least a few lives at JSC, including Jimmy's, prior to the bomb set off by the domestic terrorists he's fallen in with. Molly Cobb goes out being the most essential version of herself, the Molly Cobb who couldn't live with leaving Wubbo out in the solar flare up on the moon at the beginning of season two. Capably navigating awful situations in service to others is her métier, and she excels to the very end. Card-carrying members of the selfish pricks club do indeed make the world go 'round.
For a refreshing change of pace, everyone involved in the long-shot emergency rescue mission of getting Kelly and bébé safely up to Phoenix makes it out alive. Indeed, everything about the Martian Baby Crisis is the exact opposite of how events unfolded at the end of last season. Astronauts and cosmonauts are working harmoniously toward shared goals; nobody is opening fire on or invading others' bases; and even the space gun that makes an unwelcome appearance at the end of the previous episode is being brandished in suicidal desperation rather than with intent to attack others.
We are even treated to another of "For All Mankind's" house specialties, the narratively symmetrical irony of the North Koreans unintentionally coming to the rescue after debris from their space probe almost destroyed Phoenix back when it was a space hotel. Oh, and did we mention? After all that competition among NASA, Roscosmos, and Helios, what country landed a human on Mars first? North Korea.
Commander Lee Jung-Gil is the North Korean astronaut who confronts Dani and Kuznetsov as they approach his capsule to extract the technological doohickey they need to save Kelly. As we learn in a flashback montage that is thrilling, crushingly sad, and even funny by turns, he crash-landed on Mars, which killed his copilot and destroyed his communications technology. He's had MREs aplenty and has been conducting some of his scientific work, but nobody else knows he's alive, so he's on a ticking clock, and he knows it. And then he meets Dani and Kuznetsov.
This set piece among the three of them crackles with energy, infusing even the heaviest scenes in *For All Mankind* with an exhilarating pulse. (Let's not forget that even as Gordo and Tracy were assembling their duct-tape space suits, they were joking around and being cute together, reminding us that we cared about them as people, more than as grim-faced heroes about to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.) Both Dani's optimistic attempt at unintelligible sign language and Kuznetsov's expeditious table-turning are perfectly in character, and the scene modulates the flirtatious vibes I noted last week.
A fun update for us all: Khrys Marshall, who plays Dani and hosts the official *For All Mankind* podcast, tweeted at me over the weekend to say that although early script drafts featured heart-to-heart conversations between Dani and Kuznetsov, that storyline got trimmed out for time. However, their buddy chemistry is real and was included intentionally.
As we've seen, this season of *For All Mankind* doesn't take the notion of Gordo and Tracy Stevens' self-sacrificing act of heroism as gospel. Instead, it swaps the embrace of the popular narrative around them for uncomfortable (and perhaps unanswerable) follow-up questions rooted in deep skepticism of the entire concept of tragic heroism and its consequences for those left behind. At the end of last season, Danny and Jimmy were orphaned teenagers left holding the flags that had been draped over their parents' caskets. This season, they're man-children hovering around 30 without the emotional maturity to show for it. Is it fair to hold them solely accountable for what messes they are? Didn't NASA and the federal government as a whole owe them something more substantial than those carefully folded flags?
His brother's story is another intriguing one. It's not hard to understand why Jimmy was looking for a sense of belonging or that he thought he'd find it among fellow NASA skeptics. Given *For All Mankind*'s penchant for structuring major character arcs around alt-historical events that ring a familiar bell for viewers, I understand why there's a plot line that draws on our timeline's current mania for conspiracy theories and the very real dangers presented by white nationalists and subscribers to QAnon.
It's unclear if Timothy McVeigh Lite and Company have always been secret domestic terrorists or if they started out as straightforward propaganda-debunkers and then took a turn into amateur freelance bomb-making. Was their plan all along to pull a murderous caper mirroring the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City? The worst attack by domestic terrorists in U.S. history took place in April 1995, right around when this episode takes place, and when we see the damage to JSC, it looks a lot like the damage sustained in the OKC attack. We only ever see these fake friends from Jimmy's POV, and he plainly had no idea about the bomb, so we may never know for sure.
Of the core group in this subplot, the character who's had the most screen time is Sunny, and all we really know about her is that she's a very skilled manipulator of a very sad man.
The other major plotline that doesn’t feel fully realized is Aleida’s investigation of Margo. Having figured out the culprit, Aleida doesn’t seem to know what to do next and agrees to set aside her concerns when Margo pleads for her help with the crisis on Mars. And then the whole thing is over because Margo's office is destroyed in the bombing, and then we see her in the flash-forward to 2003, in a surprisingly swanky-looking Moscow apartment. Was she extracted just before the bomb went off? Was she kidnapped in retaliation for Sergei’s successful defection? Did she defect? We’ll just have to wait and see when season four picks this narrative thread back up.
